Neill Newman neill@entora.co.uk writes:
problems, for there are many: Java still doesn't have closures, continuations, first-class procedures...
This may be true, but how many of us know what those mean, how many of us care ;)
Now who's the person with the CS degree? What's wrong with this picture? ;-)
Alexis Lee alexis@turton.com writes:
The advantage of a huge standard library is it keeps things standardised. Instead of a zillion vendors each doing their own thing to look up, you just need to flip thru the API.
You still have the manual open when programming, the same as for extension libraries. Of course, you abstract away the platform-specifics if you can, no matter what language, so I guess that's a little work done for you. Depends how good the abstraction in the standard API is (eg *argh* Polygon and co-ordinate pairs... now what happens when not working in 2d?)
[...] I quoted Scheme instead of Prolog primarily to bait you, and secondarily because I thought more people might have heard of it. If Scheme is nothing like either L or P I will go and hide under a rock.
Normally a plonking offence, but Scheme is a lot tidier than Lisp in that a lot of the old stuff that's there for compatibility is gone, as well as some Lisp features not being in the core of Scheme. The standards are 50 pages for Scheme and 1500 pages for Common Lisp... guess which is generally faster to run ;-)
Off the list, Mark, are there any instances where a task can only be done using closures, or using a closure enhances efficiency? [...]
It's just a quick one, so I'll put it in here. Closures make caching easy, eg (pseudocode gratis):
(define cachedretr ; want more scheme? http://www.schemers.org/ (let ((cache '())) ; oooh, a variable initialised to be an empty list (lambda (id) ; the variable is in-scope in here but nowhere else ; get data and add it to the cache if it's not there and fresh ; return data from cache )))
cache is something more than a per-function private variable, I think.
And what the heck are continuations and first-class procedures?
Continuations are the future of a program at a given point. Procedures being first-class means being able to treat them as any other variable. Both features can be used for very neat tricks. No, it's not an everyday thing, but they're useful to have in the toolbox.
Anyway, I suspect Scheme is on at least as many Linux boxes as Java...
MJ Ray wrote:
Neill Newman neill@entora.co.uk writes:
problems, for there are many: Java still doesn't have closures, continuations, first-class procedures...
This may be true, but how many of us know what those mean, how many of us care ;)
Now who's the person with the CS degree? What's wrong with this picture? ;-)
I can't speak for the majority, but in my experience the best programmers are engineers, not CS students..
I'm gonna get flamed for this, I just know it.. Sz - dons asbestos suit..
Neill Newman wrote:
I can't speak for the majority, but in my experience the best programmers are engineers, not CS students..
This is probably because the engineers you know have many years of field experience, whereas the CS students generally have up to 3.
I would suggest that a 10 year engineer would lose versus a CS student with a first or 2:1 and 7 years experience. 2:2 and under is not very impressive, on my course anyway. But then I have considerably more background than most people.
Alexis
<flamewar> As an employer of programmers of some 30 years experience I find that CS graduates are generally a dead loss. I would much rather employ English or Philosophy graduates: at least they know that they don't know. They also tend to have some knowledge of the world outside computers, unlike the CS graduates who can best be described as pig ignorant.
BTW one of my sons is a [pseudo-]CS graduate. His degree is in maths+computing. </flamewar>
On 11-Sep-01 Alexis Lee wrote:
Neill Newman wrote:
I can't speak for the majority, but in my experience the best programmers are engineers, not CS students..
This is probably because the engineers you know have many years of field experience, whereas the CS students generally have up to 3.
I would suggest that a 10 year engineer would lose versus a CS student with a first or 2:1 and 7 years experience. 2:2 and under is not very impressive, on my course anyway. But then I have considerably more background than most people.
Alexis
"You got what everyone gets. A lifetime." - Death (Sandman by Neil Gaiman) "I respect faith, but doubt is what gives you an education" - Wilson Mizner "It doesn't matter who you vote for. The government always gets in."
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Raphael Mankin wrote:
<flamewar> As an employer of programmers of some 30 years experience I find that CS graduates are generally a dead loss. I would much rather employ English or Philosophy graduates: at least they know that they don't know. They also tend to have some knowledge of the world outside computers, unlike the CS graduates who can best be described as pig ignorant.
BTW one of my sons is a [pseudo-]CS graduate. His degree is in maths+computing.
</flamewar>
Sz wrote: -- nope, I was speaking purely as an observer of EE students and CS students at university.
I would suggest that a 10 year engineer would lose versus a CS student with a first or 2:1 and 7 years experience. 2:2 and under is not very impressive, on my course anyway. But then I have considerably more background than most people.
I don't agree with that, a friend got a 3rd, and I consider him way above me in most things (yeah that's you bing ;) In my opinion, just because someone has a degree dosen't mean they have more experience/knowledge than somebody else. Some of the most knowledgeable people I know didn't go to uni. The best programmer I have had the pleasure of working with used to defuse bombs in the gulf war.. and could totally run rings around me when coding.... --
<war> We have the whole academic-ranking thing here. Raphael, I must assume that you're looking for the wrong qualities in your employees. Sz, your friend Bing is not an average bloke. AFA the electronic engineers go, you're at one weird uni. None of the EE I know could shake a mouse by the tail.
There are two parts to getting a good degree- talent and effort. I'd guess R has been employing guys who spent a lot of effort learning what they needed to to get a great degree, while Bing has huge talent but just can't be a*d to work or to work the system. By the latter, I mean sometimes you have to do the wrong thing in the wrong way because it's what the examiners want. I got C's for Philosophy and Buddhism at A-level because I wrote too many original ideas, not what I'd been taught.
Degree measures are very awkward, because it's harder to apply yourself in the uni environ than at work. If someone worked, I'd basically expect a first. If they slacked, I'd expect them to have some other project to show me, in which case I'd ignore the degree.
Most of my knowledge I didn't get from uni, I got from private reading. However, there is stuff I'm learning at Uni which I never would have found on my own, and which has enabled me to think in new ways. </war>
Alexis
On 12-Sep-01 Alexis Lee wrote:
Raphael Mankin wrote:
<flamewar> As an employer of programmers of some 30 years experience I find that CS graduates are generally a dead loss. I would much rather employ English or Philosophy graduates: at least they know that they don't know. They also tend to have some knowledge of the world outside computers, unlike the CS graduates who can best be described as pig ignorant.
BTW one of my sons is a [pseudo-]CS graduate. His degree is in maths+computing.
</flamewar>
Sz wrote:
nope, I was speaking purely as an observer of EE students and CS students at university.
I would suggest that a 10 year engineer would lose versus a CS student with a first or 2:1 and 7 years experience. 2:2 and under is not very impressive, on my course anyway. But then I have considerably more background than most people.
I don't agree with that, a friend got a 3rd, and I consider him way above me in most things (yeah that's you bing ;) In my opinion, just because someone has a degree dosen't mean they have more experience/knowledge than somebody else. Some of the most knowledgeable people I know didn't go to uni. The best programmer I have had the pleasure of working with used to defuse bombs in the gulf war.. and could totally run rings around me when coding.... --
<war> We have the whole academic-ranking thing here. Raphael, I must assume that you're looking for the wrong qualities in your employees.
What I am concerned with is not the quality of the degree, nor even whether the candidate knows Design Patterns by heart. What I look for is the ability to analyse a real world situation, to communicate intelligently (and with correct spelling, grammar and punctuation, when writing), and plain common sense. Actual programming is only a small part of a programmer's job.
Raphael Mankin wrote:
<flamewar> As an employer of programmers of some 30 years experience I find that CS graduates are generally a dead loss. I would much rather employ English or Philosophy graduates: at least they know that they don't know. They also tend to have some knowledge of the world outside computers, unlike the CS graduates who can best be described as pig ignorant. </flamewar>
Please apologize for these comments.
On Fri, 14 Sep 2001, Mills wrote:
Raphael Mankin wrote:
<flamewar> As an employer of programmers of some 30 years experience I find that CS graduates are generally a dead loss. I would much rather employ English or Philosophy graduates: at least they know that they don't know. They also tend to have some knowledge of the world outside computers, unlike the CS graduates who can best be described as pig ignorant. </flamewar>
Please apologize for these comments.
Why the hell should anyone apologize for that!! It is an opinion, of which others don't agree, anyway here is my take on this I wasn't going to reply as I didn't want to generate any flamebait but however.....
My experience is that CS grads can be very good however most are only about average. If you do get a programmer who has a degree in some other subject then usually they are better than the CS student as they are thinking "out of the box" whereas CS students are quite often all taught to be sheep (as in they all learn more or less the same thing).
I am not saying that if you are a CS student (or grad) that you are crap, just that getting a degree in CS doesn't automatically make you an expert.
I have plenty of experience of people who never did a degree being absolutley s***hot when it comes to coding but this is probably as they are gifted in the art of programming, and I also think that if they had done a degree in CS then they could of learnt many bad habits or been taught to not be original.
Anyway I am just using my right to free speech... feel free to flame me or discuss futher
PS the reply-to on this mail was set incorrectly, I have changed it back to the main address and to the social list where this may be better discussed from now as it could degenerate!
Adam
On 14-Sep-01 Adam Bower wrote:
On Fri, 14 Sep 2001, Mills wrote:
Raphael Mankin wrote:
<flamewar> As an employer of programmers of some 30 years experience I find that CS graduates are generally a dead loss. I would much rather employ English or Philosophy graduates: at least they know that they don't know. They also tend to have some knowledge of the world outside computers, unlike the CS graduates who can best be described as pig ignorant. </flamewar>
Please apologize for these comments.
Why the hell should anyone apologize for that!! It is an opinion, of which others don't agree, anyway here is my take on this I wasn't going to reply as I didn't want to generate any flamebait but however.....
You have go me on my hobby horse so ... <rant> I finished my schooling in the early 60s, before most of you were born. In that I was lucky. During the 70s there was a period when 'teaching' was a dirty word: children were supposed to discover, not be taught. Teaching was held to inhibit their development. Those of you going through university now, or recently graduated, have been taught by teachers who are the product of that doctrine. That is, your teachers are themselves ignorant. You cannot therefore be surprised if, by the standards of just a few decades ago, you are considered ignorant.
There is now a move to recover the situation, to inculcate some sort of notion of a 'standard of education'. For most of you, however, it is too late; your children will benefit, but you are the product of incompetent teachers and, unless you are really determined, it will be very difficult for you to recover the situation.
On Fri, 14 Sep 2001, Raphael Mankin wrote:
<rant> I finished my schooling in the early 60s, before most of you were born. In that I was lucky. During the 70s there was a period when 'teaching' was a dirty word: children were supposed to discover, not be taught. Teaching was held to inhibit their development. Those of you going through university now, or recently graduated, have been taught by teachers who are the product of that doctrine. That is, your teachers are themselves ignorant. You cannot therefore be surprised if, by the standards of just a few decades ago, you are considered ignorant.
I am lucky then, I removed myself from the conventional education at age 13 or 14 I forget the details. Since then I have gained one GCSE in maths which was attained in a state of drunkeness (both parts) at the highest available level since then I thought education was a load of pants. I did attempt a start at an OU CS degree last year but it bored me so much that I gave it up at the end of the term, I was also p***ed off with the misrepresentation of the real world....
Interestingly today I find myself the victim of being stuck in a world where 3 potential employers are throwing offers at me to get me to work for them while I am indifferent to which one I end up at (well almost personal reasons account for something) as they are all the same but I am hanging out for basically the most cash... (I really hope they are not reading this thread though.....)
But all of these employers are asking for a degree in each position, but of course I have none. So this means they are haggling over nothing or experience or word of mouth??? I personally don't know what this means but I hope this means I am going to be employed from Monday onwards.....
Adam
Raphael Mankin wrote:
Adam Bower wrote:
Mills wrote:
Raphael Mankin wrote:
<flamewar> As an employer of programmers of some 30 years experience I find that CS graduates are generally a dead loss. I would much rather employ English or Philosophy graduates: at least they know that they don't know. They also tend to have some knowledge of the world outside computers, unlike the CS graduates who can best be described as pig ignorant. </flamewar>
Please apologize for these comments.
Why the hell should anyone apologize for that!! It is an opinion, of which others don't agree, anyway here is my take on this I wasn't going to reply as I didn't want to generate any flamebait but however
You have go me on my hobby horse so ...
^^ try got
<rant>
[snipped stuff about "modern" teaching] [snipped stuff about grammar] I subscribed to this mailing list to receive emails about LINUX, not about people who did not go to University, envious of the those who have. Mr Mankin flames all CS students by calling them "pig ignorant" in a self styled flamewar. Mr Mankin tells CS students they do not know about grammar, while in the same email he wrongly calls university lecturers, "teachers". This helps to show the small knowledge of universities the writers have. Hiring English or Philosophy graduates instead of CS is wrong, and disgusting. CS students are interested in computers and therefore their work. They also have more knowledge about computers and have a personality profile that is better for doing programming. It sounds as though Mr Mankin is just hiring people who are like him, this is common in business. It would be much better to hire on ability. Writing English and computer software are very different, and use different skills. Mr Mankin attacks universities but uses Linux, a clone of UNIX which is an OS made popular by it's use in universities. Linus was a CS student himself. So what happens to CS students who have worked at zero pay for several years including weeks of 50+ hours, they are, in your view, supposed to accept the dole queue. Please apologize or action may be taken.
Can we continue this discussion in the Social list now please, I would set the reply to header but pine is being a POS today (another reason to go back to mutt)
I am not an authority on this either and could someone please correct me if I am wrong but I think people should only be using the main@lists.alug.org.uk address as the uea one is no longer supported?
Anyway on with my reply :)
On Sat, 15 Sep 2001, Mills wrote:
Hiring English or Philosophy graduates instead of CS is wrong, and disgusting. CS students are interested in computers and therefore their work. They also have more knowledge about computers and have a personality profile that is better for doing programming. It sounds as
No, you don't choose who you employ just because they have a degree in that subject, you employ the best person for the job. I have met people who can do things with computers far better than most of those with a CS degree, just having a degree does not necessarily make you the best person for the job, getting a degree in CS obviously helps though if you want to work in computing.
skills. Mr Mankin attacks universities but uses Linux, a clone of UNIX which is an OS made popular by it's use in universities. Linus was a CS student himself. So what happens to CS students who have worked at zero pay for several years including weeks of 50+ hours, they are, in your view, supposed to accept the dole queue.
Universities are great places for people to go and study and learn, I am sure Mr Mankin does accept that universities can be good for learning.
Also your comment about Linus and Linux shows you know very little about the early days of Linux. Linus had many arguments with his course teacher about OS design and also had a flame war (resolved a long time ago) with Andrew Tanenbaum (if you don't know who he is then google is your friend) which shows that elements of the academic community were actually against Linux at one point, indeed many parts of the academic world of OS design are still against the Linux approach to doing things.
I also know of people who have gone to university who are really good programmers etc. but they have gone there to study subjects such as art or law or some unrelated discipline. The reasoning being that if they already know the subject really well then they would be better off becoming multi-talented.
I know that if i was to go to university in the future (a distinct probability) that there would be no way I would consider studying computing, I already know enough about computing I would want to learn something different that I could put my computing knowledge into to enhance.
Please apologize or action may be taken.
?
Adam
Mills wrote:
Raphael Mankin wrote:
Adam Bower wrote:
Mills wrote:
Raphael Mankin wrote:
<flamewar> As an employer of programmers of some 30 years experience I find that CS graduates are generally a dead loss. I would much rather employ English or Philosophy graduates: at least they know that they don't know. They also tend to have some knowledge of the world outside computers, unlike the CS graduates who can best be described as pig ignorant. </flamewar>
Please apologize for these comments.
Why the hell should anyone apologize for that!! It is an opinion, of which others don't agree, anyway here is my take on this I wasn't going to reply as I didn't want to generate any flamebait but however
You have go me on my hobby horse so ...
^^ try got<rant>
[snipped stuff about "modern" teaching] [snipped stuff about grammar]
OK I'll byte.
I subscribed to this mailing list to receive emails about LINUX, not about people who did not go to University, envious of the those who have. Mr Mankin flames all CS students by calling them "pig ignorant" in a self styled flamewar. Mr Mankin tells CS students they do not know about grammar, while in the same email he wrongly calls university lecturers, "teachers". This helps to show the small knowledge of universities the writers have.
But why did you subscribe to a list to learn about a free operating system when you have planly stated that we need to pay for software or it wont get written etc...
I think across this list there are a number of people who have a great knowledge of unversities, including a universitie lecturer, someone who works for the UEA, several students, several masters level students and a couple of PHD students, strikes me they know what they is talking about!
Hiring English or Philosophy graduates instead of CS is wrong, and disgusting. CS students are interested in computers and therefore their work. They also have more knowledge about computers and have a personality profile that is better for doing programming. It sounds as though Mr Mankin is just hiring people who are like him, this is common in business. It would be much better to hire on ability. Writing English and computer software are very different, and use different skills. Mr Mankin attacks universities but uses Linux, a clone of UNIX which is an OS made popular by it's use in universities. Linus was a CS student himself. So what happens to CS students who have worked at zero pay for several years including weeks of 50+ hours, they are, in your view, supposed to accept the dole queue. Please apologize or action may be taken.
Actions such as? remove them from the list? this I would like to see, Mark as admin would you like to remove these people from the list? I don't think I could with a clear conscience! :o)
As for hiring a Phil grad of english grad, I think they are all entitled to the job, if they can do it. As I said qualifications only mean stuff to personel and HR, to the rest we are all considered on our skill set, I worked for three years with people who had degrees ranging from Pyscology to maths to CS to electronics and then me and a couple of others with no degrees. As I said before a degree means shit,
I think here you make massive sterotypes of the people who do the different courses, I have in my Inbox the CV for a women who has a psychology degree who is no doubt a better C++ programmer than I a student of Computer Systems engineering!
If a CS student is good they will get a job, if not they join the dole que like the crap english, art, enginnering, music <insert subject here> student. I think it is you who needs to wake up and realise that those bits of paper we all wave about mean nothing!
How you can say some of your comments on Linux on this mail while also speaking out about it on IRC I don't know.
Sorry for the non-linear nature of this rant I am a bit annoyed ATM
Thanks
D
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Alexis Lee wrote:
Neill Newman wrote:
I can't speak for the majority, but in my experience the best programmers are engineers, not CS students..
This is probably because the engineers you know have many years of field experience, whereas the CS students generally have up to 3.
nope, I was speaking purely as an observer of EE students and CS students at university.
I would suggest that a 10 year engineer would lose versus a CS student with a first or 2:1 and 7 years experience. 2:2 and under is not very impressive, on my course anyway. But then I have considerably more background than most people.
I don't agree with that, a friend got a 3rd, and I consider him way above me in most things (yeah that's you bing ;) In my opinion, just because someone has a degree dosen't mean they have more experience/knowledge than somebody else. Some of the most knowledgeable people I know didn't go to uni. The best programmer I have had the pleasure of working with used to defuse bombs in the gulf war.. and could totally run rings around me when coding....
imho of course ;) Sz
Alexis
"You got what everyone gets. A lifetime." - Death (Sandman by Neil Gaiman) "I respect faith, but doubt is what gives you an education" - Wilson Mizner "It doesn't matter who you vote for. The government always gets in."
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MJ Ray wrote:
Alexis Lee alexis@turton.com writes:
platform-specifics if you can, no matter what language, so I guess that's a little work done for you. Depends how good the abstraction in the standard API is (eg *argh* Polygon and co-ordinate pairs... now what happens when not working in 2d?)
Well, if the lib's broken, it's broken, no matter where it is. The real problem is knowing what tools exist. If a lib is in the stdlib, I can find it very easily, if it isn't I have to search. And to search I need a fairly good idea of what I need.
(define cachedretr ; want more scheme? http://www.schemers.org/ (let ((cache '())) ; oooh, a variable initialised to be an empty list (lambda (id) ; the variable is in-scope in here but nowhere else ; get data and add it to the cache if it's not there and fresh ; return data from cache )))
cache is something more than a per-function private variable, I think.
I understand this to be roughly equivalent to a function static variable in C, which is what you've said it's something more than, so I've obviously missed something. Can you copy a closure? In which case you'd copy the 'cache' static var as well, which would be neat. But then, it would be much neater to have a Cache object.
Procedures being first-class means being able to treat them as any other variable. Both features can be used for very neat tricks. No,
java.reflect.Method ? Haven't used it for ages, but I think it allows this.
Anyway, I suspect Scheme is on at least as many Linux boxes as Java...
Depends whether you count the JRE included in browsers. And whether Guile is Scheme or not- I think Gnome uses Guile for something, so that would up numbers a lot.
Incidentally Mark, as a reward for getting this far I'll admonish you to make the URLs on your homepage relative. They're all at cloaked still.
Alexis
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Adam Bower -
Alexis Lee -
David Freeman -
Mills -
MJ Ray -
Neill Newman -
Raphael Mankin